There is no anomaly here when once we get at the comic point of view. In Molière’s plays, the source of laughter lies in this very intrusion of the ill-shapen into a community of well-rounded forms. It is the intruder on whom we fix the eye, for whose unpredictable antics in a world for which he is not made our expectation is set. The serious background is there, but does not take a strong hold of our minds: we are not greatly moved, for example, by the spectacle of the sufferings of the daughters and the wards of testy old gentlemen, or even of the wearing housewifely anxieties of Madame Jourdain. The proper world, into which the absurdly ill-fitted is here pitchforked, is but a background, rendering the valuable service of backgrounds by throwing into relief and so sharply defining the form for which the spectator’s eye is accommodated. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the whole plot of one of these comedies consists in the showing up of the grotesque unsuitability of the comic character to its environment. It groups its persons and arranges its scenes as if with the intention of demonstrating the futility of the attempt of this droll figure, lop-sided, and of an awkward gait, to move about in our ordered world. This helps us to understand why Molière, though, as observed above, he now and again resorts to older and more elemental sources of mirth, is able to be so economical in the use of disguise {370} of improbable encounters, and of the other mechanical devices of the entertaining show. The situations themselves as well as the action seem to arise out of the fundamental facts, the given characters and their relations. Thus, one is hardly surprised to find Harpagon in the ignoble part of a money-lender, to whom the son he has pinched betakes himself. The enjoyment of the comedy here provided presupposes a trained faculty. There must be the quick observant eye that catches in side-glance all the relations, and yet remains accommodated for the laughable. There is no place for a mixed tone, for a blend of laughter with melancholy sentiment. The serious is envisaged less as the serious, than as the framework within which the comic figure moves. The mood is one of a purely gay observation, which has no room for pity, indignation, or any other emotion; which is brightly and coldly intellectual; which is content with just looking and being amused. For a right understanding of the scope of laughter in comedy, we need to glance at another of its developments. In the so-called “Comedy of Manners,” as illustrated in the English plays of the Restoration, we have undoubtedly to do with a very special trend of the comic spirit.